Two sisters who prosecutors said are at the center of a mortgage fraud scheme appeared Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Sacramento.

Vera and Nadia Kuzmeko are charged with running a scheme that prosecutors cheated mortgage lenders out of about $9 million between December 2006 and September 2007.

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According to an indictment handed up by a federal grand jury last week, the Kuzmenko sisters used straw buyers to purchase 20 homes, mainly in Roseville and Sacramento.

Prosecutors tell KCRA 3 the sisters inflated the sales prices of the homes by producing phony invoices for improvement projects that were never done.

"It could be new swimming pool, landscaping, other improvements to the home," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Lapham.

When the homes were sold, the Kuzmenko sisters are accused of splitting the profits with the straw buyers and other associates.

In addition to the Kuzmenko sisters, six other people are also charged. They are Aaron New, Veniamin Markevish, Edward Shevtsov, Peter Kuzmenko, Sergey Blizenko and Vanik Atoyan.

U.S. District Judge ordered Vera Kuzmenko held without bond. Court documents said she was a flight risk and had purchased round-trip tickets for a flight to Kiev, Ukraine. The documents indicate she came to the United States in 1988 as a refugee from the Soviet Union.

Nadia Kuzmenko was released on a $250,000 bond. Her lawyer, Bill Portanova, said outside court that during the height of the housing boom, many real estate workers became sloppy with paperwork.

"Now five years later that sloppiness gets looked at. And the sloppiness is now construed as a conspiracy," said Portanova.